Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Writing

I was actually going to respond to a writing prompt Wendy put up about Robert Frost, but I misread it and came up with this. It reminds me a lot of what Mr. Everett said:

I have actually felt this coming into this English class. I always thought I was a pretty decent writer. I get the job done, and people tell me I’m good at writing papers. So when starting 1020, I wasn’t really worried about the writing aspect at all. I’m a pretty ramble-y writer, so length usually doesn’t get me down. I make pretty good grades on my papers too, and teachers leave good comments sometimes. But that day that Wendy put people’s sentences on the board, and started tearing them up word-for-word, I felt I really didn’t know the first thing about writing. I just put whatever I think on paper, I don’t get really technical with it. I do pay attention when I should support what I say, put quotes, or start a new paragraph. But breaking down a sentence that much, to the point where you can’t use ‘to be’ verbs really though me for a loop. I thought maybe I wasn’t that good after all. Reading over these magazine articles and really paying attention to how these people right has made me see that I don’t really know that much about writing at all. But I think that I can get better, and I hope to prove it in this big paper.

3 comments:

Rich said...

Man who you telling we did that in class to and she tried to make us write a new sentence to replace it and everbody in the class was so scared to write something cause even the beat sentences has flaws in the man that class does not get any worse than that but I guess it is worth it in the end.

emilyanne said...

I felt the opposite way coming into this class. I've never been really great at writing just because I really hate to read and they kind of go hand in hand. I had Wendy last semester and the class made me feel more confident in my writing because Wendy made us feel like we could write about anything we wanted and it would be important. No teacher has ever displayed writing like that to me.

Wendy said...

That's the hard thing about school. You end up learning, more than anything, that you know less and less than you thought you did. I hate to tell you, but the further you go along, the "worse" that gets. However, it becomes a pleasure because the world really does seem to open up for you - boundaries are pushed back and horizons expand. I hope this will be an exciting experience for you.